Brian Barrett: They have about $80 billion to spend, $75 billion of which I think they’ll have to spend over the next four years. So yes, they will keep expanding. And when you think about how much influence the 3000 agent officers had in Minneapolis alone, it’s like an eighth of that, they could replicate some version of it in a lot of different places.
Leah Fieger: And honestly, I’m giving voice to the many local journalists across the country who have been contacting me over the last few days, just to ask questions about the places that we’ve named that are near them or in their states or cities. And what keeps coming up to me is that in addition to new buildings, they are being put into pre-existing government buildings, pre-existing leases, or what appears to be a plan. And then we also found that a bunch of these ICE offices are located near what are planned to be huge immigration detention warehouses, and we’re looking at setting up offices 20 minutes, an hour, 20 minutes away from these. Yes. So we’re looking at different, triangulating it around you having to have your lawyers, your agents, have a place to receive their orders and have their computers and in some ways do very mundane things that are required for this kind of operation.
Brian Barrett: Well, Leah, that’s a good point. I think when people hear about ICE offices or when I do it intuitively, I think of ICE as guys with guns and masks and so on, but that’s not exactly what we’re saying here. Do you have any objection to telling what these offices are being used for and by whom? Because ICE aren’t just masked guys with bad tattoos.
Leah Fieger: Yes absolutely. So what we reported in this story was there were some specific parts of ICE that actually reached out to GSA and asked them to expedite the process of getting new leases, etc., for example, where the Ola representative, Ola is the office of ICE’s chief legal counsel. So they’re lawyers, they’re ICE lawyers who are working with the courts and saying yes, no, et cetera or arguing deportation orders, signing documents, putting everything in front of judges. This is a really important part of this whole operation that we’re not talking about much. There’s a lot of focus on the DOJ. There’s a lot of focus. There was an excellent article in Politico this week talking about all these federal judges who are really upset that DHS and ICE are ignoring their requests to not detain immigrants anymore.
The missing layer of this are the lawyers who are part of this who are representing ICE here in the US government, and that is Ola. So as we’ve been reporting to acquire these leasing locations, they have contacted GSA extensively, specifically with the OLA legal request. I just want to know how big it is. Just how huge this ICE is, it repeatedly underlines its expansion into cities around us and the memo we got from Ola says that ICE will be operating in Birmingham, Alabama, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville and Tampa, Des Moines, Iowa, Boise, Idaho, Louisville, Kentucky, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Grand Rapids, Michigan, St. Louis, Missouri, In Raleigh, North Carolina, Long will expand its legal operations. Island, New York, Columbus, Ohio, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, Richmond, Virginia, Spokane, Washington and Cord Delaney, Idaho and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We also have other locations throughout the article, but those are requests from OLA.
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